4.2 Beyond McGregor s Theory Y: Human Capital and Knowledge-Based Work in the Twenty-First-Century Organization

4.2 Beyond McGregor's Theory Y: Human Capital and Knowledge-Based Work in the Twenty-First-Century Organization

Thomas A. Kochan, Wanda Orlikowski, and Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld

Nearly fifty years ago, at the Sloan School's 5th Anniversary Convocation, Douglas McGregor launched a debate over how to manage "The Human Side of the Enterprise".^[1] By comparing what he called Theory X and Theory Y perspectives, he challenged the management profession to reexamine its assumptions about the motivations employees bring to their jobs. The question was: Could employees be trusted and empowered to do good work, or did they have to be closely directed, monitored, and controlled to act in the interests of the firm? While McGregor's Theory Y sparked important innovations in human resource practices, it did not challenge fundamental assumptions underpinning the twentieth century organizational model. If, as is widely recognized, human capital and knowledge are the most important sources of value for the twenty-first-century organization, then fundamental assumptions about the relationship between work and organizations will also need to be challenged.

The approach that dominated organizational theory, teaching, and practice for most of the twentieth century looked at organizations from the top down, starting with a view of the CEO as the "leader" who shapes the organization's strategy, structure, culture, and performance potential. The nature of work and the role of the workforce enter the analysis much later, after considerations of technology and organization design have been considered. However, if the key source of value in the twenty-first-century organization is to be derived from the workforce itself, an inversion of the dominant approach will be needed. The new perspective will start not at the top of the organization but at the front lines, with people and the work itself—which is where value is created. Such an inversion will lead to a transformation in the management and organization of work, workers, and knowledge.

We believe accomplishing this inversion is among the most important challenges facing organization and management theory, research, teaching, and practice today. In fact, these challenges have been at the forefront of the research of a number of Sloan School research groups (see figure 4.2.1). Furthermore, several Sloan faculty recently stated these challenges in the provocative form of a "Manifesto for the 21st Century Organization."^[2] And, over the past semester, we have explored these challenges with a range of industry experts, Sloan School students, and alumni in our course on "Managing Transformations in Work, Organizations, and Society."

Piore and Sabel on "The Second Industrial Divide" (1984)

Kochan, Katz, and McKersie on "The Transformation of American Industrial Relations" (1986)

Schein on "Culture and Leadership" (1988)

Senge on "Learning Organizations and Systems Thinking" (1990)

Bailyn on "Integrating Work and Family" (1992)

Orlikowski on "Use of Technology in Organizations" (1992)

Ancona, Kochan, Scully, Van Mannen, Westney on "Organizational Processes" (1994)

Walton, Cutcher-Gershenfeld, and McKersie on "Strategic Negotiations" (1994)

Orlikowski and Yates on "Collaborative Technologies" (1994)

Cutcher-Gershenfeld et al. on "Knowledge-Driven Work" (1998)

Osterman, Kochan, Locke, and Piore on "Working in America: A Blueprint for the New Labor Market" (2001)

Carroll on "Organizational Learning in the Midst of Crisis" (2001)

Sterman and Repenning, on "Nobody Ever Gets Credit for Fixing Problems That Never Happened" (2001)

Murman et al. on "Lean Enterprise Value" (2002)

Malone and Morton on "Inventing Organizations of the 21st Century" (forthcoming)

Figure 4.2.1: Selected Sloan faculty research reexaming assumptions about people, work, and organizations.

In this paper, we build on these efforts to first contrast the twentieth and twenty-first century organizational models and then to examine how organizations are attempting to move toward a human capital and knowledge-based model of organizing (see figure 4.2.2 for our methods and process). Finally, we explore the implications of this alternative organizational model for the future of management education.

This paper has its roots in an MIT course entitled "Managing Transformations in Work Organizations, and Society," which was first offered in the spring of 2001 and again offered in the spring of 2002. The course, which was developed under the leadership of Tom Kochan in partnership with Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld, Wanda Orlikowski, and others, focused on all of the themes covered in this paper. From the outset, the course involved participation from Sloan and other graduate students on campus, as well as System Design and Management (SDM) students on rotation back in their home organizations. It also included lifelong learning participants from partner corporations such as the U.S. Air Force, Pratt & Whitney, Ford, Hewlett-Packard, Lucent, NASA, Otis Elevators, Polaroid, Qualcom, Saturn, Teradyne, Visteon, and Xerox. It involved both in-class discussion, remote video participation, and online discussions.

In honor of Sloan's 50th Anniversary, we offered Sloan alums the opportunity to participate directly in the sessions as well as the chance to follow the discussions and make contributions through the Internet. Over one Hundred Sloan alums signed up at the Web site and contributed comments or vignettes on the topics covered in the course. Students in the class drew on their own experience and interviewed some of the alums to generate additional vignettes on all of these topics. They also organized all of these data into integrative final papers that corresponded to the themes for the course. The analysis in this paper draws on independent research conducted by all three authors as well as the many vignettes, comments, and papers generated. Current Sloan student experience and the experience of Sloan alums are woven throughout the text (with the names of specific individuals and organizations deleted for confidentiality).

Figure 4.2.2: Methods and process in developing this paper.

Contrasting Assumptions: Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Organizational Models

As evident in figure 4.2.3, the organizational model that dominated the past century embodied assumptions (about people, work, technology, leadership, and goals) that contrast with the model that may come to dominate the next century.

Assumptions about:	Assumptions characterizing 20th century organizations	Assumptions that may characterize 21st century organizations
People	Theory X: People are a cost that must be monitored and controlled	Theory Y: People are an asset that should be valued and developed
Work	Segmented, industrially-based, and individual tasks	Collaborative, knowledge-based projects
Technology	Design technology to control work and minimize human error	Integrate technology with social systems to enable knowledge-based work
Leadership	Senior managers and technical experts	Distributed leadership at all levels
Goals	Unitary focus on returns to shareholders	Multi-dimensional focus on value for multiple stakeholders

Figure 4.2.3: Contrasting assumptions in twentieth and twenty-first century organizations.

Like McGregor, we are counterposing two alternative models, each of which involves competing assumptions. Reality, of course, may involve a spectrum of choices between these extremes, but it is helpful to understand the way alternative choices will pull organizations in one direction or the other. In the balance of this section, we will examine the implications of each of these assumptions.

People: Labor Costs or Human Assets?

Conventional economic and organization theory views labor as a cost to be controlled. Moreover, since labor cannot be separated from its human motivation and free will, incentives are needed to ensure employees will commit their full energies and skills to the goals of the organization. Labor also brings its own interests and sources of power to the organization. Therefore, efforts on the part of employees to use their collective power by forming unions or other organizations to represent their own interests need to be discouraged or defeated.

A human capital, knowledge-based perspective understands workers as human assets who create the value of the organization. By joining and staying in the organization, employees invest and put at risk some of their human capital. By taking advantage of opportunities for continued learning and development, their human capital is deepened and expanded. Since employees have interests and obligations outside of work—to their professions, families, communities, and themselves—they cannot and do not wish to commit their full energies to the organization. Therefore, efforts are needed to integrate work and personal aspects of life. Employees also bring a variety of expectations to their jobs, including an interest in having meaningful influence and voice in matters that are important to them. At the same time, employers can reasonably expect employees and their representative organizations to contribute to the continued viability and effectiveness of the enterprise. Therefore, efforts are needed to engage employees individually and collectively in ways that simultaneously address organizational and individual interests and expectations.

Work: Industrial or Knowledge-Based Systems?

The early years of the twentieth century witnessed the gradual movement from agrarian and craft to an industrial model of work organization. The latter part of the century has witnessed efforts to continue the transformation from the industrial to a knowledge-based system of work organization. That transformation process continues today.

The industrial model created sharp legal and status distinctions between managers who conceived and directed how work was done and nonmanagers who executed their tasks as directed. Productivity was maximized by organizing tasks into well-defined jobs and functions. Efficiency gains were achieved through increased specialization and formalization of reporting relationships, promotion paths, and compensation rules.

The transformation in work systems underway today involves efforts to shift from industrial to knowledge-based work systems that blur the lines between managerial and nonmanagerial work. These systems assume that in a knowledge-based economy, high levels of performance can only be achieved by organizing work in ways that allow workers to use and deepen their knowledge and skills, while working collaboratively on multiple, temporary projects to accomplish flexible and innovative operations. As a result, there is an emphasis on horizontal interrelationships among diverse groups (both internal and external), and the coordinated use of teams, cross-functional task forces, and cross-organizational alliances and networks.

Technology: A Mechanistic or Integrative Perspective?

Technology is conventionally viewed as a physical asset—a piece of machinery or an information system—that is initially developed and designed by technical experts and then implemented for use by the workforce. This view emphasizes the mechanistic dimensions of the technology, while disregarding or attempting to eliminate the human side. For example, a major function of technology in this view is to reduce reliance on human inputs—both the quantity of labor and the variance (error) that can result from human judgment, fatigue, lack of motivation, or direct challenges or conflicts with management decisions or actions. Even today, the dominant assumption in much of the machine tool industry, for example, involves designing people out of the process—even at the expense of flexibility and innovation.

A human capital, knowledge–based view of technology is best captured by the saying that it is "workers who give wisdom to the machines."^[3] Technology is understood to be simultaneously physical and social, and its capabilities are only effective when employed in practice by workers operating in a variety of social/organizational contexts. This relational view of technology recognizes that technological outcomes are highly contingent and emergent—depending on how the technical capabilities interact with human choices, political actions, cultural norms, and learning opportunities over time. In this view, benefits from technologies can only be realized when the technical and social dimensions are integrated through the design, implementation, and ongoing adaptation of the technologies employed in an organization.

Leadership: Exclusive Role of the CEO or a Distributed Capability?

Leadership is conventionally viewed as being vested primarily in the role of the CEO and other top executives. The CEO is to provide vision and broad strategic direction to the rest of the organization and in doing so shape the culture and values of the enterprise. The search process for CEOs therefore focuses on identifying individuals in top positions in apparently successful organizations who appear to have these personal attributes. Wall Street analysts, the business press, and business school case studies often attribute organizational success (or failure) to the quality of the CEO's leadership, thereby perpetuating this image of what leadership is and where it resides in organizations.

A human capital, knowledge-based view of the enterprise envisions leadership as a distributed capability that involves multiple people and groups at all levels of the organization. To be sure, the CEO and other executives are critical players in leading a process which generates a clear and compelling shared vision for the organization. However, such action by senior executives is not sufficient unless and until it engages the aspirations and energies of all organizational participants. Leadership is thus more than a set of individual traits or abilities; it is a set of capabilities that extends throughout the organization and over time. In this view, a CEO would be seen to be effective if she/he creates the conditions that enable people at all levels in the organization to exercise leadership in their everyday activities. Performance in the twenty-first-century organization is a function of the quality of leadership capabilities in action throughout the organization.

Goals: Value for Shareholders or Multiple Stakeholders?

This brings us to a fundamental question: What purpose(s) do organizations serve? With the rise to prominence of the modern corporation, the answer that dominated American organizations and management education throughout most of the twentieth century was that business organizations exist to maximize shareholder value. This reflects a recognition of the role played by owners who provide and put at risk the critical resource—significant pools of financial capital—needed to build large corporations. As a result, the governance structure and processes are seen to be the exclusive domain of the financial owners and their direct agents, the CEO and other top executives.

Knowledge-based organizations depend on employees to invest and put at risk their human capital in joining and remaining with the firm. This places human capital in an analogous position in the twenty-first-century organization to that of financial capital in the twentiethcentury corporation. Thus, employees could claim a legitimate role in shaping the objectives of the organization to be consistent with their interests and values. Other stakeholders can make similar claims. Suppliers, for example, are increasingly responsible for critical aspects of product design, inventory management, and other tasks that require long-term partnership agreements. Communities have legitimate claims to the social and environmental impacts generated by the products and processes of organizations. Governments today are more interested in long–term, public–private partnerships (government as "enabler" rather than "enforcer"). Even regulatory agencies are exploring more interactive relationships with the regulated community. Thus, processes of stakeholder—not just shareholder—governance assume strategic significance in the twenty-first-century organization. Viewed one way, these many embedded stakeholder relationships represent complex constraints on organizational flexibility and innovation. Viewed another way, these same stakeholder relationships constitute an extended enterprise capable of delivering value to the organization and to these many stakeholders in unprecedented ways.^[4]

Today, organizations are connected to these many stakeholders in complex networks including strategic alliances, public-private partnerships, and other collaborative initiatives. In all cases, there are both common interests that bring these parties together and conflicting interests that threaten the viability of the cooperative venture. In many cases, individual organizations may come and go, but others will take their place in these emerging institutional arrangements. Therefore, organizations are called upon to take a longer view—ensuring today's actions do not make it more difficult for future generations of citizens and communities to realize their aspirations and objectives. Management and management education needs to take a longer-term, sustainability perspective and a broader, networked view of organizations. More emphasis is needed on developing professional standards, ethics, and norms that hold individuals and organizations accountable for their effects on multiple stakeholders, both today and in the future.

Taking Stock of Current Organizational Practice

The above distinctions between twentieth- and twenty-first-century organizational models are somewhat oversimplified. Few organizations could survive by completely ignoring some of the assumptions underlying either model. And, as noted, many organizations have been pursuing aspects of a human-centered, knowledge-based approach for some time. So the reality today is that organizations have implemented different sets of assumptions drawn from both the twentieth- and twenty-first century organizational models depicted above. Below, we draw on the data collected from our industry participants, students, and alumni to take stock of current organizational practices as experienced by the people in these organizations. These are the people who will collectively shape the organizations of the twenty-first century. In this section, we summarize their experiences and assessments of current practice, their visions for where they want their organizations to be in the future, and their ideas for what it will take to get there.

People: The Workforce of the Twenty-First Century

One word best captures the contemporary workforce: diversity. A second key word applies to the workforce of tomorrow: scarcity.

Diversity and Its Implications

Tomorrow's workforce, even more than today's, will depart dramatically from the twentieth-century image of the average (some would say "idealized") worker as a male breadwinner or organizational man with a wife at home attending to family and community affairs. Today, workers are more diverse in gender, race, ethnicity, age, nationality, and culture, just to mention the more obvious and visible features. The households that workers come from are equally diverse, with less than 20 percent fitting the old image. The majority have either both spouses/partners in the paid labor force or are headed by an individual who is a working, single parent. Work and family decisions are highly interdependent.

Leading firms are recognizing the importance of both the need to attend to demographic diversity and work and family issues, as box 4.2.1 illustrates. Our research and the views of our students and alumni suggest that most firms have internalized the legal and social responsibilities introduced by the civil rights movement and laws enacted in the 1960s and 1970s. For example, there is considerable training aimed at "valuing diversity." Today's workforce generally also shares these values, especially younger workers who have grown up in more diverse cultural and racial settings. Many of our students and alumni therefore are more frustrated than supported by this type of training. They are ready for something more substantive.

Box 4.2.1 A More Diverse Pool of Future Leaders

"Over the past 20 years, the demographics of our company's professional staff have been changed dramatically. Female engineers today represent a large percentage of the population and a large percentage of its high potential future leaders. These are employees we desperately want to hold onto for the long run."

—Contribution to Sloan Student/Alum Dialogue in Course on "Transforming Work, Organizations, and Society" (Spring 2002)

The current challenge in managing diversity is to go beyond efforts to change attitudes to focus on building the skills needed to facilitate work in diverse teams and to learn from the variety of backgrounds and knowledge people bring to their jobs. This is how the diversity in our contemporary workforce can be used to add value to both workers and their organizations. Box 4.2.2 provides a vivid example of this opportunity, drawing on the efforts of Japanese managers teaching their U.S. counterparts how to relate and sell to their Japanese customers.

Box 4.2.2 Learning Across Cultures

"As the number of Japanese sales staff was reduced, the local staff built good connections with Japanese OEMs and delivered the same quality services without the assistance of Japanese expatriates. To do this, the local sales staff needed to learn skills and know-how to build the relationships with Japanese OEMs…. This change did not happen naturally".

—Contribution to Sloan Student/Alum Dialogue in Course on "Transforming Work, Organizations, and Society" (Spring 2002)

People are also highly diverse in the expectations they bring to their work and organizations. To be sure, as survey data and labor market behavior continue to demonstrate, good wages and benefits remain a high priority for all workers. But these, by and large, are taken as a given—a necessary condition for individuals to consider a prospective job offer. Beyond these essentials, as a recent survey supplied by Towers Perrin indicated (see table 4.2.1), jobs have to be tailored to the priorities of different groups. Young workers place highest priority on possibilities for learning and developing their skills; midcareer and midlife workers value the opportunity to integrate work and family life; and older workers assign highest priority to long-term employment and income security. Most workers, young and old alike, appear to have learned the lesson of the past decades' breakdown in the prospect of long-term jobs. Over 40 percent of those employed actively look at alternative job opportunities on a regular basis and few see it as their responsibility to stay with a given employer for any particular length of time.^[5]

Table 4.2.1: What attracts employees by age

Top attractors	U.S. Overall	Age 18–29	Age 30–44	Age 45–54	Age 55+
Competitive base pay/salary	•	•	•	•	•
Competitive healthcare benefits package	•	•	•	•	•
Opportunities for advancement	1	1	2	3
Work/life balance	2	2	1	2
Competitive retirement benefits package	3			1	1
Pay raises linked to individual performance	3		3	3	2
Learning and development opportunities	3
Source: Towers Perrin Talent Report 2001: New Realities in Today's Workforce
Key: • Core rewards that rank at the top for all groups 1–3 Top differentiators in rank order

Clearly, the actions of organizations in the last decade have shaped the expectations of the current workforce. Few are ready to commit their loyalty and put their trust in any single firm to provide lifetime jobs and careers. This does not, however, mean that they all want to be "free agents." As these data and others show, employees still expect firms to manage in ways that offer learning and career development opportunities. Also, with age comes the heightened priority of and expectation for long-term security. Fairness in employment decisions—layoffs, compensation, and promotion opportunities—are just as much an expectation today as in the past.

Work–family integration serves as today's frontier workforce issue. Of all the issues we examined, it generated the most interest among our alumni, students, and industry participants. They documented a wide range of "family-friendly" policies and procedures offered in their organizations today, including flexible hours, part-time options, assistance with domestic services, and back-up day care. They also indicated that these policies and procedures often remained underused and, consequently, were ineffective. This is not for lack of thought on these matters. As one individual observed, being a "married couple with dual careers requires a constant evaluation of [our] roles as parents and professionals."

Two factors stand out as constraints, limiting the use and effectiveness of work–family policies. In many professions and organizations, the use of part-time options is still interpreted as signaling less commitment to the organization and to one's professional career. This was brought home vividly by our expert panel from the legal profession. Beth Boland, a partner in the Boston law firm of Mintz Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky, and Popeo, P.C., reported that although over 90 percent of leading law firms in Boston now provide a part-time option for associates and partners, less than 5 percent of those eligible actually take advantage of the option. Moreover, more than one-third of lawyers believe doing so would hurt their careers.

Similar low rates of uptake on work–family policies are reported in other studies and by our students and alumni in their organizations, for comparable reasons. The importance of face time and full-time commitment appear to still permeate the culture of many organizations and professions, dominating the images of the ideal worker or high potential employee in the eyes of senior executives and even peers. As one student commented, "Unfortunately, there still does occur this notion of 'face time' that seems to equate the number of times your face is seen to that of a higher performer." Box 4.2.3 from another student further elaborates on this issue and the overall gap between policy and practice.

Box 4.2.3 Gap Between Policy and Practice

"All of the work-life programs, however, are in reality used by only a small proportion of employees. The reasons for this are:

1. Rarely do male employees ever use them. Female employees therefore don't use them because they don't want to be seen as different than other employees.

2. With today's culture of starting work earlier than required and working later than required, many employees are reluctant to leave the office before their colleagues.

3. As others in the class pointed out, face time is very important. Out of sight is out of mind."

—Contribution to Sloan Student/Alum Dialogue in Course on "Transforming Work, Organizations, and Society" (Spring 2002)

The second constraint lies in the need to focus on changing the work itself, collectively among peers and supervisors. Our colleague Lotte Bailyn^[6] has documented this in her work and suggests the need to design work collaboratively around a dual agenda: achieving high performance and allowing individuals to integrate their work schedules with personal and family obligations. In the legal community, for example, Beth Boland pointed out that the legal work itself is well suited to part-time arrangements, because most lawyers divide their time among many clients. As a result, reduced time arrangements just mean a reduced number of clients, not a reduction of effort in support of any one client. This sort of thinking is at the core of the approach that Lotte Bailyn has advocated.

The difficulty and yet the potential for addressing the stresses associated with the long hours professionals put into their work was brought home vividly through a vignette offered in box 4.2.4 by the spouse of a physician-resident.

Box 4.2.4 Reflections from the Spouse of a Medical Resident

"In addition, in spite of the fact that she was putting in all this effort, the head of the program, coming from a time when surgeons were men, with wives at home taking care of everything, could not understand how this lifestyle was not maintainable for her. There were no support programs or other alternatives available. Surgeons were supposed to do their job, not complain, and stick it out."

—Contribution to Sloan Student/Alum Dialogue in Course on "Transforming Work, Organizations, and Society" (Spring 2002)

The biggest uncertainty and most interesting source of debate involves whether the next generation, the so called "Gen Y" cohort, will bring and maintain different values and expectations than those of their parents. After all, they will have observed the breakdown in the social contract experienced by their parents and experienced the increased number of hours their parents have been devoting to the paid workforce. There is some anecdotal evidence to suggest that this generation is deeply committed to building individual skills and capabilities, but highly distrustful of organizations and other workplace institutions. There are even some indications of an unwillingness to work long hours of overtime at the expense of personal and family matters. If these are indeed defining characteristics of this cohort—shaped by their experiences growing up during the eras of rightsizing, downsizing, reengineering, and outsourcing—then there will be significant human capital challenges for organizations and industries in the future. These challenges appear to be particularly acute in such fields as autos, aerospace, and NASA, all of which are facing a demographic shock with as many as one-third of the employees eligible to retire in the next five years.

The Coming Labor Force Scarcity?

Predicting future labor supply/demand balances is tricky because multiple variables—including the rate of economic growth, productivity, immigration, working hours, retirement trends, and global sourcing of work—all interact to affect this balance. Nevertheless, straightforward projections by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, using moderate estimates of these variables, suggested that by 2010, labor supply in the United States could fall approximately five to ten million workers short of demand.^[7]

The challenge is clear: Workers will be a scarce resource and those with the most knowledge and skills will be among the most scarce, as box 4.2.5 illustrates. The organization that seeks to compete on the basis of human capital and knowledge will need to learn how to attract and retain these valued workers. Thus, if anything, the individual and collective power of the workforce will continue to increase.

Box 4.2.5 Stress and Shortage for Technical Professionals

"Having entered the workforce in 1949 has allowed a unique perspective. Several factors contributed to the present condition. In the late 60's and early 70's corporations became increasingly concerned with mergers, acquisitions, global considerations and the issues associated with high technology. As a result, pay scales for 'in-demand' positions such as patent law and technology specialties increased to attract talent. However, as salaries increased there was also an expectation of 60–70-hour work weeks. Also, as pay increased many companies could not afford to continue adding staff, so they began loading people down to accomplish the work. This carries through to today where people in technical shortage categories are still expected to perform to their pay level. Also, where supply is an issue for these positions, it is easier to get one person than two so the one hired may end up being asked to do more than the work of one."

—Contribution to Sloan Student/Alum Dialogue in Course on "Transforming Work, Organizations, and Society" (Spring 2002)

The vision for the future that emerged from our discussions and interviews is one that addresses the frontier challenges—managing diversity and addressing the different expectations of the workforce—by letting the people solve these problems themselves. This is a refrain that will echo through the visions expressed not just for this challenge, but for all those discussed in this paper. Young lawyers aspire to succeed in their profession just as much as their counterparts of an earlier generation. But they also want to attend to their family and personal lives and to rearrange work processes and caseloads to better meet their dual agendas. They recognize they cannot do this unless others in their profession and in leading companies work together to change the culture and norms of their profession. The same movement is underway among residents in the medical profession. They are ready to transform the way they do their work, and, in the process, gradually change the culture of their professions and organizations. Will those in power in organizations support or frustrate these efforts? The answer to this question will influence the way this transformation process plays out in the years ahead.

Knowledge-Based Work

The last quarter century has witnessed the gradual diffusion of what are called knowledge-based work systems among front-line manufacturing and service workers. The general consensus derived from a broad range of studies and the experience of our industry participants is that these produce higher levels of organizational performance and higher levels of learning and employee satisfaction than the industrial models of work organization they are replacing.^[8] Yet, the best known examples of knowledge-based work systems are generally in what are termed "greenfield" facilities (literally, new facilities built in open, green fields). Most organizations fall into the "brownfield" category—existing operations with many of the legacy twentieth-century assumptions firmly in place.

Implementing the new work systems in these existing operations requires extended and continued effort. Leaders from one Pratt & Whitney facility participated in our class and cataloged their fluctuating efforts to implement team-based work systems and sustained labor–management cooperation. Successes were periodically set back by turnover of plant managers or union leaders, and by decisions to outsource work or lay off employees, which undermined the trust needed to build and retain employee support for these workplace changes and innovations. This is not an isolated example. The best estimates from our research and others are that about one-third of U.S. establishments have implemented some features of knowledge-based work systems in their operations.^[9] Very few have achieved what might be termed a transformation. Whether these efforts will be maintained and whether further diffusion will occur depends on the actions of a variety of stakeholders—managers, workers, labor union representatives, Wall Street analysts, and government policy makers. The key issue is whether these stakeholders will recognize the value that knowledge-based work systems offer the workforce and the economy, and choose to work together to sustain the momentum already underway, or will short-term decisions by these groups limit or even undermine transformation efforts?

Alongside the implementing of new work systems is another key labor market development: the increased use of various types of contract, consultant, and project work arrangements. From the demand side of the labor market, these arrangements offer employers access to specialized knowledge from outside sources, flexibility, reduced headcount and associated labor cost reductions, and the opportunity to focus on core competencies. From the supply side, these arrangements can also offer opportunities to learn across jobs and organizational assignments, while also providing more options for integrating work with different stages of personal and/or family life, for example, combining work with further education, child or elder care duties, or as a bridge into retirement. The downside of these arrangements lies in the reduction of benefits, employment security, status, influence, and more variable earnings for contractors. The costs to the organization include increased coordination requirements, potential safety or security risks, and the potential loss of organizational knowledge or capability—all downsides that become more visible after the outsourcing decision.

Clearly, if managed well, there are potential benefits to both organizations and individuals from sensible use of contracting arrangements. Our students and alumni see both the benefits and the pitfalls of these work arrangements playing out in their organizations (see box 4.2.6 for one student's experiences with contracting). Their hopes and aspirations for the future are that they and their organizational peers will learn to use these flexible arrangements sensibly, to draw on the knowledge and skills of independent contractors/consultants or those in transition stages of their life cycle, and to not use this option as a shortterm way to simply reduce headcount or compensation costs.

Box 4.2.6 Mixed Results with Contracting

For many tasks and positions, a contracting arrangement does indeed provide a benefit to the government. After all, there is probably little difference with regards to maintenance workers, technicians, and other unskilled or low-skill support personnel as to whether they are government or private-sector employees. Tasks for these employees also tend to be better defined, and supervisory functions are limited to general personnel-related issues. My observation, however, is that when the jobs that are contracted out become more complex, requiring higher-level skills and increased experience, then the system breaks down and ceases to function properly. This leads to more waste, less productivity, and more frustration on the part of both the civil servants and the private sector employees. I believe that this is due to several interrelated causes:

• First, the structure of the contract is usually such that there is no incentive for the private contractor to hire the best-qualified candidate. Instead, the least-costly candidate that meets the minimum criteria as specified in the job description is the person that is hired. This is because if the contractor hired a more costly candidate, then he might exceed his proposed budget, which would count against him when profit is calculated or when the contract is up for renewal.

• Second, a weaker candidate that is available immediately is preferable over a stronger candidate who may be available in one or two months. The reason for this is that every month that the position goes unfilled will usually count against the contractor's performance or profit. So the private contractor has every reason to fill every position as fast as possible. Whether the candidate is the best or not does not really matter to the bottom line.

• Third, in positions requiring more experience or skills, supervisor, reporting, and chain-of-command-related issues become more common and more complex.

• Fourth, one of the reasons that is often used to justify the on-site contractor structure is that it allows government programs to be more flexible in adjusting personnel levels, since the theory is that private contractors can lay off people more easily than the government. However, while this is true for many low-wage, low-skill positions, my observation is that most of these on-site contracts have significant job-protection guarantees built-in. In one case, three-month notices are required before a lay-off can occur. These policies, while socially laudable, diminish the value of the on-site contractor arrangement, making the need for such arrangements, especially with regard to higher-skilled jobs, questionable.

—Contribution to Sloan Student/Alum Dialogue in Course on "Transforming Work, Organizations, and Society" (Spring 2002)

Integrating Technical and Social Dimensions of Technology

In the last quarter of the twentieth century, U.S. manufacturing industries learned about the need to understand technology as an integrated system of technical and social dimensions. That is, they learned that a return on their investments in hardware could only be realized if they were linked to complementary investments in education, work redesign, and cultural change. The U.S. auto industry learned this the hard way, by losing market share to Japanese competitors in the 1980s—competitors who were quicker to build this socio-technical principle into their production systems, employment practices, and work operations.

Our research has documented that the greatest returns to both manufacturing and information technologies come when the technical dimensions of technology are appropriately integrated with the organizational and human dimensions. Two Sloan students, John Krafcik^[10] and John Paul MacDuffie,^[11] demonstrated that world class productivity and quality performance were achieved in auto plants that integrated deployments of technology with the development of flexible, knowledge-based work systems, deep investments in training and development, and high levels of employee participation in problem-solving and decision-making. Plants that adopted this integrated approach outperformed plants that invested more in technology without corresponding investments in human resources and work system innovations, and plants that continued to operate with more traditional industrial models of production and work organization. Later, the same results were replicated not only in other manufacturing industries but with information technologies as well.^[12]

The relationship between the technical and social dimensions of technology has been further elaborated by Wanda Orlikowski's research on the uses of information technologies in the workplace.^[13] Her studies investigated the implementation of new information technologies in U.S., European, and Japanese firms. With a few exceptions, she found that these firms had failed to realize the benefits anticipated by their technological investments—not because of some failure in strategy, technology, or deployment—but because these firms had failed to manage the most critical determinant of technological effectiveness in organizations: how people actually use the technologies to get their work done. These findings suggest the importance of shifting management attention from one primarily focused on managing technologies as physical assets to one focused on managing the human and organizational use of technologies. Managing the use of technology requires recognizing the critical interdependence between technical capabilities and the human capital (knowledge, skills, motivations) and work systems (norms, incentives, practices) that realize the value of those technical capabilities in practice. It also recognizes that use of technology will change over time—as requirements evolve, market conditions change, learning occurs—and thus resources need to be dedicated to enable workers to adapt and augment their technologies and their use routines, as appropriate, over time.

These same lessons are now being learned in the area known as "knowledge management." As box 4.2.7 indicates, there are many dilemmas associated with the narrow concept of "capturing" knowledge. Note that this example links issues of knowledge management with issues of labor turnover.

Box 4.2.7 The Dilemma of What Knowledge to Capture

The constant turnover of personnel in our organization has made even assuring short-term knowledge continuity very problematic…. First we tried to capture the basics, without focusing so much on the step-by-step instructions. This proved to be unsuccessful…. There is an extreme reluctance on the part of the users (scientists) to assume anything that was not explicitly written down….In response to these comments… we would write down every step, providing check-points, approximate times of completion, etc. The result was that the procedures grew from a single 30-page manual to an over 500-page book…. This approach was as unsuccessful as the first one…. Some people are asking for more detail, others are asking for less. No matter what we do, someone will be disappointed.

—Contribution to Sloan Student/Alum Dialogue in Course on "Transforming Work, Organizations, and Society" (Spring 2002)

One of the pioneers in the area of knowledge management, Larry Prusak from IBM's Institute for Knowledge-Based Organizations, built on this point in his presentation to our class, as illustrated in box 4.2.8.

Box 4.2.8 Information Technology and Knowledge Creation

It has been argued "technology's most valuable role in knowledge management is extending the reach and enhancing the speed of knowledge transfer." Information technology is indeed very useful in capturing, storing, and distributing structured and codified knowledge, therefore enabling other individuals in the organization to have access to it. However, IT plays a much more limited role in knowledge creation, which is very much a social process involving the exchange of hard-to-codify knowledge and personal experiences. Also, IT, by itself, cannot create a knowledge-based environment that promotes knowledge use and sharing. For any technology to be optimized, it must be augmented by strategy, process, culture, and behavior that support knowledge sharing and knowledge-based work."^[1]

—Contribution by Larry Prusak to Sloan Course on "Transforming Work, Organizations, and Society" (Spring 2002)

Building Leadership Capabilities

Most business school cases are written and discussed from the vantage point of the CEO or others positioned at the top of their functional areas or departments. This sends the signal that it is the brilliance or individual leadership of those at the top who solve critical organizational problems and which accounts for the success or failure of organizations. The leadership model implicit (and sometimes explicit) in these cases is one of the charismatic, visionary, and powerful strategist alongside a top-down model of innovation and change. Some have argued that in the last decade corporate boards of directors have been seduced by the business press (a seduction possibly reinforced by business schools) to search for a charismatic CEO to be the "leader" who will provide the new vision and direction to transform organizational performance.^[14]

At Sloan, we are in a process (led by Deborah Ancona) of developing an alternative view of leadership better suited to modern organizational realities.^[15] We see leadership as a distributed capacity, exercised individually and collectively at multiple levels of the organization. This capacity is constituted by four interdependent capabilities: visioning, sensemaking, relating, and inventing. As organizations decentralize and flatten hierarchies, engage in greater cross-functional teamwork, and participate in multiple, dynamic, network-like interactions, we believe that the capabilities of this distributed model of leadership become even more relevant and effective in practice. Moreover, as organizations form more cross-boundary strategic alliances and become part of larger networks, leadership capabilities must be shared across these boundaries. In this way, leadership and change are highly interdependent processes.

While the Sloan distributed leadership model continues to stress the importance of developing individual capabilities, it recognizes that leadership is a collective phenomenon that requires engaging the energies, interests, and aspirations of the many people that constitute the organization—those involved in doing the everyday work of the enterprise. In this respect, distributed leadership cuts across all of the topics covered in this paper. As box 4.2.9 illustrates, for example, diversity training can and should bridge into broader leadership capabilities.

Box 4.2.9 Linking Diversity Training and Leadership Skills

"Diversity training is mainly to help employees better understand other employees who are different from them. Additional training would be valuable if it worked more on the group process and leadership necessary to translate diversity into positive organizational results".

—Contribution to Sloan Student/Alum Dialogue in Course on "Transforming Work, Organizations, and Society" (Spring 2002)

Redefining Organizational Goals

One inevitable consequence of adopting a human capital, knowledge-based organizational model is that the voices of employees will become more influential in shaping the values, goals, and priorities of the twenty-first-century organizations. Judging from the level of interest exhibited by our Sloan Fellows students, high on the list of priorities of employees today are concerns for social and environmental sustainability. These leaders want to work in and lead organizations in ways that ensure their children and future generations have the same opportunities as they do. This is the vision they express in their thesis projects and comments. Thus, sustainability may be the frontier example of how the underlying objectives of organizations may change in human centered organizations.^[16] (See box 4.2.10 for an example.)

Box 4.2.10 Social and Environmental Sustainability: the Athabasca Oil Sands Project

The objective of the Athabasca Oil Sands Project (a joint venture effort led by Shell Canada) is to mine the estimated 100-yr supply of oil. While this oil field had been discovered as early as 1956, two prior attempts to mine the oil had failed on technical and environmental grounds. A big concern was the large environmental footprint associated with the mine and the 300 miles of pipeline. It was only on the third attempt, begun in 1996, that a breakthrough was reached, and oil was successfully produced. This third attempt was uniquely steered by social and environmental sensitivities and community need for involvement. Shell Canada's success came from being able to demonstrate to all the critical stakeholders that the project could provide economic, social, and environmental benefits. Through a participatory, collective approach—including and engaging local communities, experts, and NGOs—Shell Canada was able to realize numerous advantages for the community of Athabasca:

• 1,000 permanent jobs were established within the local community with as many as 12,000 employed during the construction peak.

• The community benefits from substantial tax revenues.

• The project helped to build and augment the skills of the local people.

• Process water was recycled, thereby reducing demand on local rivers.

• A domestic supply of gas was developed, resulting in less dependency on oil imports.

• No chemicals were utilized in the oil separation process, and mine lands will eventually be restored to a natural condition.

• A groundbreaking climate change program was developed to address international concerns and to identify ways to reduce CO₂ emissions.

• An independent panel of experts continues to identify other means for carbon offsets as well as renewable energy alternatives.

—Contribution to Sloan Student/Alum Dialogue in Course on "Transforming Work, Organizations, and Society" (Spring 2002)

A number of organizations have made highly visible commitments to managing from a sustainability perspective. This movement is farther advanced in Europe, in part because the European Community will shortly require companies to report outcomes related to what they view as their "triple bottom line," that is, people, profits, and planet. Shell and British Petroleum are among the leaders in emphasizing sustainability, as documented in a thesis by two recent Sloan Fellows, Clare Mendelsohn and Anirudha Pangarkar.^[17]

In the United States, we examined the Ford Motor Company's highly visible effort to refurbish its River Rouge manufacturing complex following principles of sustainability. The result has been a bold rethinking of the relationship between a factory, its products, and the environment. Ford's CEO William Clay Ford has been an outspoken advocate of the River Rouge initiative and the corporation has even added "environment" to its traditional set of standard metrics on safety, quality, delivery, cost, and morale. Still, the concept of sustainability has not yet become deeply embedded in the values and beliefs of the company's managers or in the corporation's manufacturing processes and product development processes. A small staff and a handful of strong line leaders support Ford's sustainability initiatives, but it remains to be seen if the vision will continue beyond the current CEO. That is, is the commitment to sustainability itself sustainable?

Another area where managing multiple stakeholders is critical is that of strategic partnerships, including labor-management partnerships, public-private partnerships, customer-supplier partnerships, and even strategic alliances among competitors. In class, we observed that these strategic partnerships are characterized by constant tensions—such as the tension between the personal relationships between individuals in the respective organizations and the formal roles that these individuals have—which can lead them to withhold information, act unilaterally, and otherwise undermine the relationships they have built. Similarly, there is a constant tension between the pressure to deliver short-term results and the long-term process of constructing and sustaining a partnership. These and other tensions reveal that strategic partnerships are fundamentally unstable organizational forms, dependent on a constantly adapting agenda which continues to deliver value to all parties.

We examined one unique labor-management partnership on this issue: the Kaiser-Permanente health plan partnership, which involves eight unions representing 55,000 workers in 26 bargaining units across 18 states. We heard evidence of the way that these partnership efforts have helped to grow the business by valuing employee knowledge, as well as by constructing path-breaking joint initiatives on work-family matters, the reduction of medical errors, systems for conflict resolution, and even methods of compensation. At the same time, we also learned of the constant difficulties of incorporating innovative lessons into ongoing organizational operations, as well as the difficulty of addressing key stakeholders who are not part of the partnership, whether they are the doctors who have a separate organizational structure within Kaiser-Permanente or the other unions and bargaining units that have chosen not to be part of the partnership.

Beyond the issues of strategic partnerships, we also explored examples of innovation in local, state, and federal government. Here the issues involved not only mechanisms to value employee knowledge and capability, but also transformation around redefined outcomes, greater collaboration, and new roles for the "clients" being served by the agencies. In her thesis on social sustainability, Sloan Fellow Lynne Dovey^[18] found that broader social systems change requires a new role for governments (whether local or national): a role where they engage in power-sharing and joint accountability with organizations and communities, enable valued outcomes rather than only enforce regulations, create incentives for collaboration with multiple stakeholders, participate in longer term, relational contracting, and practice distributed leadership.

Implications for Management Education

As business schools rose to prominence over the twentieth century, organization theory and education focused more and more on management within the individual firm. Organizational control, autonomy, flexibility, and managing uncertainty became key issues. Priority was given to strategies for attracting and allocating financial capital, managing these and other firm assets in ways that return value to shareholders, and protecting the firm from the influence of agents, groups, and organizations that lie outside the firm's boundaries. Organizations were conceived as "going concerns" that survive indefinitely, so potential future liabilities or costs were discounted and incorporated into current decision making.

As we rethink assumptions around the nature and value of work and organizations, key adjustments to business school curricula are needed. Just as we inverted the analysis of work and organizations to reflect where value is created, so too do we need to revamp teaching to provide future managers and leaders with the perspectives, knowledge, and tools that enable organizations to realize the potential value from the workforce and their knowledge. Each dimension highlighted in this paper—workforce demographics, knowledge-based work, integration of social and technical systems, distributed leadership, and expanded organizational goals—will need to be integrated in the curricula and supported with practical tools and experiences.

We need, for example, to prepare business leaders to address high priority, sensitive workforce issues such as diversity and fair treatment, as well as career development and work-life integration. The management skills and tools needed here are straightforward: engaging, listening to, negotiating with, and facilitating different forms of individual and collective employee voice. Whereas twentieth century workforce management focused on command and control, in the twenty-first century the workforce is directly engaged in the management process. Skills in negotiations, problem-solving, conflict resolution, and coordination of horizontal, cross-boundary interactions need to become the standard tools of the trade.

Similarly, knowing how to implement and sustain mechanisms for knowledge creation and application is essential in the knowledge-based organization. This requires an understanding of the needed knowledge, skills, and abilities at every phase of what is sometimes termed a value stream in an organization. Most efforts to manage value streams effectively are focused on mapping the flow of products or services from conception to ultimate customers—looking for constraints and improvement opportunities. Our analysis would call for training next-generation managers to be able to do a parallel mapping of knowledge and capabilities—looking for constraints and opportunities along the dimensions of knowledge and human capital.

In the domain of technology, we would call for deeper and more explicit attention to the interdependence of social and technical aspects of business operations. The MBA degree grew to prominence in the twentieth century as a specialized profession, separate from the disciplinary training of other university departments. This reinforced the view that issues of training, development, teams, and even leadership should be treated separately from efforts to design, implement, and innovate with various types of new technology. Managing the twenty-first-century organization will require integrating state-of-the-art knowledge and skills that cut across traditional disciplinary boundaries. The implication here is clear: management schools need to be better integrated with their physical and social science and engineering counterparts, and vice versa.

As we educate next-generation business leaders, we must better understand and appreciate the leadership development that has occurred over the past decade. Even if the so-called Internet bubble has burst, what still remains is a cohort of young, talented people who have developed valuable insights and capabilities in this concentrated ebusiness crucible. Already there is anecdotal evidence to suggest that this cohort is less interested in traditional business cases centered on large, multidivisional corporations and more interested in learning that incorporates what they now know, as well as the kinds of organizational settings to which they aspire. Leadership, as Robert Thomas and Warren Bennis emphasize,^[19] is often best learned through experiences of failure. The lesson here is obvious: we simply have to work with our students to help them and us to reflect on and learn from the rich experiences they bring into our classrooms.

The basic assumption of a shareholder- and customer-driven, profitmaximizing organization is woven throughout business school education. Much less common is attention to the multiple stakeholders associated with any business operation and the objectives or metrics relevant to these other stakeholders—whether they be the workforce, communities, regulatory agencies, strategic partners, or suppliers. Our challenge is to build on and go beyond such initiatives as "the balanced scorecard,"^[20] "stakeholder value,"^[21] reciprocal contracts, and related mechanisms for attending to outcomes for multiple stakeholders. We have found the best way to do this is by bringing representatives of these different stakeholders into our classes—to hear directly about their perspectives, interests, and the value they can add to organizations and to build cases and simulations that put students in these different stakeholder roles and hold them accountable for addressing these multiple criteria.

Conclusion

We draw three broad conclusions about the diversity of practice in organizations today, the process of transformation, and the leverage associated with broader assumptions on work and organizations. First, the differences between the two organizational models outlined at the outset of this paper are reflected in organizational practices today, where organizations are seen to be positioned at various points along the continua characterizing these two organizational models. Many organizations are currently trying to transform themselves as they recognize the importance of human capital and knowledge to their future effectiveness.

Second, there is no guarantee that such a transformation process will continue or succeed. It is not guided by some invisible hand or market imperative. Indeed, we have encountered many "disconnects" between rhetoric and reality. Organizational change is a highly political, contested process involving individuals and groups with different, often conflicting, interests, beliefs, and power. Therefore, whether the various transformations currently underway will result in organizations more suited to the demands of the twenty-first century will depend on management's willingness to challenge fundamental assumptions about organizations and the quality of the negotiated change processes they engage in with various stakeholders.

Third, we have outlined a broader set of assumptions about work and organizations that represent a powerful set of levers for transformation. Yet to put this larger set of assumptions "on the table" for discussion and change will require opening a dialogue with the various stakeholders who share an interest in and commitment to building effective twenty-first-century organizations. The implication here is simple but blunt: the future of management (and management education) is too important to leave to managers alone! Employees from the front lines through middle management and the executive ranks, professional associations and unions, families and communities, partner organizations, as well as nongovernmental organizations and government policy makers are all part of the network of leaders who need to be engaged and involved in shaping the organizations of the twenty-first century.

McGregor asked us to rethink our assumptions about people. Now our task is to examine an even broader set of assumptions around the very nature of work and organizations. The choices we make will determine whether the rhetoric around the twenty-first-century organizations will become a reality.

Acknowledgments

Invaluable assistance in this research was provided by Natasha Iskander, Jen Fabas, Lynn Dovey, Carolyn Corazo, and many other participants in the Sloan seminar 15.343 on "Transforming Work, Organizations, and Society." Support for this paper was provided through MIT's Sloan School of Management and the Cambridge-MIT Initiative (CMI).

^[1]Presentation to the Sloan School's 5th Anniversary on "The Human Side of the Enterprise" by Douglas McGregor and later expanded into a book: Douglas McGregor, The Human Side of the Enterprise (New York: McGraw Hill, 1960).

^[2]MIT 21st Century Manifesto Working Group, Sloan School of Management, "What Do We Really Want? A Manifesto for the Organizations of the 21st Century," November 1999.

^[3]Haruo Shimada and John Paul McDuffie, "Industrial Relations and Humanware," Sloan School of Management Working Paper, 1987.

^[4]Earl Murman, Tom Allen, Kirkor Bozdogan, Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld, Hugh McManus, Debbie Nightingale, Eric Rebentisch, Tom Shields, Fred Stahl Myles Walton, Joyce Warmkessel, Stanley Weiss, and Sheila Widnall, Lean Enterprise Value: Insights from MIT's Lean Aerospace Initiative (New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2002).

^[5]Towers Perrin, Talent Report 2001: New Realities in Today's Workforce (New York: Towers Perrin, 2002).

^[6]Lotte Bailyn, Breaking the Mold (New York: Maxwell Macmillan, 1993).

^[7]Howard Fullerton, Jr., and Mitra Toossi, "Employment Outlook: 2000–2010—Labor Force Projections to 2010: Steady Growth and Changing Composition," Monthly Labor Review, November 2001, pp. 21–38.

^[8]Casey Ichniowski, Thomas Kochan, David Levine, Craig Olson, and George Strauss, "What Works at Work?" Industrial Relations, 1996, 299–333.

^[9]Paul Osterman, "Work Organization in an Era of Restructuring: Trends in Diffusion and Impacts on Employee Welfare," Industrial and Labor Relations Review 53 (2000): 179–96.

^[10]John Krafcik, "Triumph of Lean Production," Sloan Management Review 30 (1988): 41–52.

^[11]John Paul MacDuffie and John Krafcik, "Integrating Technology and Human Resources for High-Performance Manufacturing: Evidence from the International Auto Industry," in Transforming Organizations, ed. Thomas A. Kochan and Michael Useem (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 209–27; John Paul MacDuffie, "Human Resource Bundles and Manufacturing Performance: Organizational Logic and Flexible Production Systems in the World Auto Industry," Industrial and Labor Relations Review 48 (1995): 197–221.

^[12]Timothy F. Bresnahan, Erik Brynjolfsson, and Lorin M. Hitt, "Information Technology, Workplace Innovation, and the Demand for Skilled Labor: Firm Level Evidence," in The New Relationship, ed. Margaret M. Blair and Thomas A. Kochan (Washington, D.C., The Brookings Institution, 1999), 145–184.

^[13]Wanda J. Orlikowski, "Learning from Notes: Organizational Issues in Groupware Implementation," Information Society Journal 9 (1993): 237–250.

^[1]Laurence Prusak and Salvatore Parise, "Information Systems as a Conduit for the Transfer of Knowledge." Paper produced by the IBM Institute for Knowledge Management, Cambridge, MA, 2002.

^[14]Rakesh Khurana, Searching for a Corporate Savior: The Irrational Quest for Charismatic CEOs (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002).

^[15]Deborah G. Ancona, Thomas W. Malone, Wanda J. Orlikowski, and Peter Senge, "Distributed Leadership," Sloan School of Management Workshops, Cambridge, Mass., 2001/2002.

^[16]Peter Senge and G ren Carstedt, "Innovating Our Way to the Next Industrial Revolution," Sloan Management Review, January–February, 2001.

^[17]Clare Mendelsohn and Anirudha Pangarkar, "Case Studies of How BP and Shell are Approaching Sustainable Development." Master's Thesis, Sloan School of Management, Cambridge, Mass., May 2002.

^[18]Lynne Dovey, "Achieving Better Social Outcomes in New Zealand Through Collaboration: Perspectives from the United States." Master's Thesis, Sloan School of Management, Cambridge, Mass., May 2002.

^[19]Warren Bennis and Robert J. Thomas, Geeks and Geezers (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2002).

^[20]Robert Kaplan, Strategy Focused Organizations: How Balanced Scorecard Companies Thrive in the New Business Environment (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2001).

^[21]Murman et al., Lean Enterprise Value.